Let me share my son went with a 1KUSD buck gaming laptop. This one and we swapped the HDD for SSD for 150 bucks for a nice speedup overall.
Here's the single 960m and he tells me Metal Gear Solid 5 runs like butter.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-960M.138006.0.html has a lot of green so I can't guess what would need a dual 980m.
For 1K he got a 1080 screen, 16GB DDR4, sixth gen i7 and it's not running hot or noisy.
I currently own a desktop and a laptop and have some questions about upgrade possibilities.
1. I noticed that graphics cards have "CUDA". If I am running a non-graphically intensive game, will these cores in any way enhance the speed of calculations? For example, will the time it takes to process a turn in turn-based strategy games be quicker?
2. I am thinking of replacing both my desktop and my laptop with a new computer. Budget is $5k Canadian. Will a fully-loaded laptop use significantly less power than a desktop that is the same price?
3. I am having trouble finding benchmarks for the following 2 GPUs:
MSI (R9 390X GAMING 8G) AMD Radeon R9 390X 8GB GDDR5 (for my desktop)
Dual 8GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M with G-SYNC (for my laptop).
If I don't plan to run games at greater resolution than 1920 x1080, will the dual GPUs actually make a difference over a single GPU? (and again, would the 2nd GPU's Cuda benefit CPU performance?)
4. I am currently running Windows 7 32-bit on my laptop and desktop. Would 32 GB of high-speed memory dramatically speed up my computer, in addition to the processor, including in games where calculations are done at the end of a turn?
5. The main concern with buying a laptop is that the CPU just isn't as powerful as on a desktop, and I don't want to get behind the technology curve too much. I read that CPUs generally aren't the bottleneck and that a good cache helps me with other bottlenecks. Basically, I am wondering if memory and GPUs will be more important than the speed of the processor. I can get an 8 core processor for a desktop but only a quad-core 4.2 GHz processor with a laptop.
6. Is there a way to tone down the GPUs if I need more battery life? What about switchable graphics cards (in which case I would not have a dual graphics card in my laptop)?
Sorry for the long post.
Rob

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